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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 5266524, member: 289"] - Our program has been reduced to hoping we can be competitive with power conference teams. Tennessee is more than that: #1 in the net rankings, but we celebrated losing to Texas by 4 points and Texas Tech by 5 points. I was pleased we were down only 10 at halftime after missing 7 free throws. We’ve got to get this plane in the air before we run out of runway or we could be in for years of mediocrity like what happened to the football team. I look forward to joining Donnie Freeman and Choppa Moore with Sadiq White and Kiyan Anthony but that seems far off. And maintaining momentum requires rebuilding the team each year. What if Donnie and Choppa are no longer here? You need to be able to get better players out of the portal that Jaquan Carlos, Lucas Taylor, and even Eddie Lampkin, (I’ll take Jayre Davis). Tennessee totally rebuilt their team from last year and they are way better than we are. Why? - Red Autry said after the Cornell game that “Guys who aren’t going to play with heart and who aren’t going to do what we ask them to do will not play moving forward and that’s just the bottom line”. Save for the injured Starling, we had the same starting line-up for this game and the most criticized players, Jaquan Carlos and Chris Bell played the most minutes. There was a play with about 7 minutes left. Red had called a time out and sent the team back out. They ran a play with crisp passing that led to an open Chris Bell three from out front. Chris missed, Tennessee got the rebound. We were down by 31 points. But Red was enthusiastically clapping his hands. Matt Park said he was doing it because his team has successfully ran the play Red diagramed to give Chris the open shot. It has come to that: our coach applauding his team for running a play correctly in a blow-out loss. In his press conference after this game, Red said “This is not what this is. This is not Syracuse basketball” and vowed that his team will play better in the future. The problem is, this is what this is until they do that. - We came into this game with a 259-203 edge in rebounding and 143-108 in offensive rebounds. I felt this was our best chance to compete in this game – get the ball. We were out-rebounded 26-40 and 5-13 on the offensive boards. - In the first half we were down 10 but were 3 for 10 from the line while the Vols were 11 for 13. Eight of the 10 points we were down were because we couldn’t shoot at the line. We wound up 12/21. Donnie Freeman who had been 15/17 (88%) missed the front end of a one and one. Chris Bell, (80%) got fouled on a three and missed all three. Petar Mastorovic (78%) was 0 for 2. - Petar fouled out in 11 minutes. All the fouls gave him -8 net points. Lucas Taylor, whose skills don’t tend to appear in a box score was -1. Three other guys were zero. Jaquan Carlos played 37 and got 3NP. Eddie Lampkin got 4 in 23 minutes. [/QUOTE]

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